PennPraxis's New Fairmount Park

It looks like the powers that be in Fairmount Park have been cruising the internet for market research, finally addressing some of the obstacles that keep the Schuylkill River's wild success from spilling over into Fairmount Park's Lemon Hill and Strawberry Mansion.

However they've consulted PennPraxis, Philadelphia's captain of the Master Plan Pipe Dream. PennPraxis does what it does well. But they're visionary designers sought for ideas, not business minded developers. When ideas are sourced from PennPraxis they prepare a vision as if they control the available (and sometimes unavailable) land with unlimited funds, ignoring financial realities.

Were money no object, some good ideas have been addressed. The primary focus seems to be connecting the river to the park space east of Kelly Drive. The plan proposes a crosswalk at Strawberry Mansion, enhancing pedestrian quality and slowing Kelly Drive's notoriously fast traffic. But Strawberry Mansion doesn't host Kelly Drive's heaviest swell of pedestrians, many of whom walk the Schuylkill from Boathouse Row to Girard Avenue and turn around.

Girard Avenue's missing piece seems insignificant given PennPraxis's grand proposal of a new, public boathouse, small boat rentals, and new gardens. Girard Avenue may have been ignored because the east side of Kelly Drive at Girard tends to get very urban very quickly. But a Girard Avenue crosswalk would do more than just control traffic and provide a safe passage for residents and recreationalists. It would provide visitors with a sidewalk to the Philadelphia Zoo and Centennial Park, and offer those who turnaround at the rock a loop back to Boathouse Row over Lemon Hill.

PennPraxis's sprawling ambition in Fairmount Park is indicative of many oversized attempts to produce a cohesive master plan. Echoing numerous attempts to redesign Penn's Landing, these ideas ignore space that currently succeeds. Neglecting the space's current assets such as Lloyd Hall and the Philadelphia Police Department's boathouse upstream, PennPraxis suggests building an additional public boathouse rather than improving or expanding those that already exist.

Perhaps the most shortsighted element in the design is its overall approach, which spreads down from Strawberry Mansion from areas less traveled, rather than branching out from trails that already succeed. Essentially the plan gambles on its own success. Field of Dreams was more than just Kevin Costner's last great movie. It was a lesson. In the end, he lost his farm. If new crosswalks further north see limited use, it risks our chances of ever seeing new crosswalks at more practical locations.

A map of the master plan remains to be seen, but if it is as integrated as the latest proposal for Penn's Landing it could stall in a stream of blind ambition. Cohesive plans look great on paper but can rarely be executed without bottomless funding, not solely because they're so large, but because the integrated pieces can't work alone.

You don't have to think small to think smart. But you do have to think outward, consider financial realities, and with the agility for a master plan's individual components to evolve in the process. Link the park space where it's most used. Connect recreationalists to profit points like the Philadelphia Zoo and Memorial Hall. Consider variables that will prove the master plan is a viable one so that future funding presents itself when necessary.

Hargreaves Penn's Landing

Philly.com and PlanPhilly are calling it a first look. Philly Magazine calls it the future.

The Delaware River Waterfront Corporation's Thomas Corcoran stated, “We don’t want this to be another plan sitting on a shelf," and boy has Penn's Landing seen it's share of those.

Hargreaves and Associates' redesigned Penn's Landing extends the existing I-95 cap to Walnut Street, completing the block, carrying the park over Columbus Boulevard, Penn's Landing's large parking lot, and to the water. It replaces the concrete Great Plaza and finally removes the useless west end of the nonexistent aerial tram to Camden.



From 1997 to 2004, the Delaware River Port Authority wasted over $13M on preliminary construction of an aerial tram called the Skylink, with more than $1M spent on additional "studies."



Additionally, Hargreaves employs a Calatrava like pedestrian bridge at South Street completing the street's connection to Penn's Landing.

The design is highly conceptual and open to speculation. Parking at the landing appears to be replaced by an elevated park, although it's not clear if parking will remain under the green plaza. The renderings also make some assumptions, for example the Chart House is gone.

As one of the few businesses catering to Penn's Landing, the Chart House will likely remain or will in someway be incorporated into Hargreaves new architecture.



In 2003, City Hall held a costly design competition. The Atlantis was one of the more outrageous proposals. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the competition was all part of a corrupt scandal that ended with an FBI investigation.



As it is, Festival Pier is huge. But as a concrete venue it's largely unused unless it's reserved for an event. Hargreaves proposal triples the amount of contiguous space, but transforming the entirety into a green space makes it an inviting public resource.

Add the Lombard Street pier to the mix, where the South Street pedestrian bridge ends, and the DRWC has itself a nice collection of inner city landscaping.



At one point Cesar Clarke Cesar of Cira Centre threw their name in the game, incorporating Penn's Landing's Skylink into what it referred to as Founders Square.



Perhaps one of the best elements in Hargreaves Penn's Landing is its openness to private development. The nonsensical flyovers between Market and Chestnut have been camouflaged by mid-rise apartment buildings, three setting right on the river.

So far no private developers have signed on, but if the city and the DRWC are willing to relinquish this property to make way for apartments and businesses, Penn's Landing's biggest obstacle - a lack of any reason to be there - is finally addressed.

The layout of Hargreaves and Associates Penn's Landing, and the DRWC's most recent pitch for a new waterfront.

More apartments on the water may not be enough to entice Society Hill's pedestrians and tourists to Penn's Landing, but it certainly helps offset such a costly endeavor, one the Seaport Museum and a few old ships can't carry themselves.

Penn's Landing as envisioned by Hargreaves and Associates, perhaps Penn's Landing's most hopeful proposal to date.

Hargreaves likely wants to stamp its brand on the design, evident in the fact that the firm has erased the existing park atop I-95, simply called I-95 Park. As it is it's a nice space, with it's truncated oval cut in half it was clearly designed to extend onto a nonexistent cap that was never completed.

Hargreaves completes the transition, but with their own design.

All of this may be moot when you consider the numerous empty promises and costly design studies performed by PennPraxis, the DRWC, the Delware River Port Authority, or whatever organization happened to be managing Penn's Landing at any point in the past forty years.



One of Penn's Landing's more...interpretive renderings. Personally, I love art that looks like the dreamscape of a junkie's K-hole, but I'm not sure where an engineer would find the fourth dimension required to actually build this.



The Race Street Pier was the DRWC's first major project since they were created in 2009. Prior to that nothing had been done with Penn's Landing since the Seaport Museum and the Great Plaza were built in the 1990s.

Although the Race Street Pier has been wildly popular, it's still new and the longevity of its success remains to be proven. Unlike Sister City's Park and a redesigned Dilworth Plaza, both of which are a response to Center City's residential growth that provide park space for people already on the ground, the Race Street Pier is an attempt to lure people to the water. We've seen how the "build it and they'll come" approach has worked in the past with the Festival Pier we have today. People love new parks, but quickly tire of them when they realize there's not much else around.

If the DRWC can muster the funds to bring even part of this project to fruition, particularly greening Festival Pier, it will be a vast improvement of what's there. Unfortunately, there will still be little reason to be there once the newness wears off.

The fatal flaw in Hargreaves plan echoes a mistake that the DRWC and Penn's Landing's managers before them can't seem to grasp. Without a wild destination attraction at river - think the St. Louis Arch or the London Eye - Penn's Landing will always be a detached lawn with a view of Camden far from anything interesting.

With Philadelphia's tradition of obscene cost overruns in everything it builds, a new Penn's Landing could easily exceed the cost of the Pennsylvania Convention Center but doesn't guarantee any return. It's understandable that those in charge are reluctant to pull the trigger on a design that isn't perfect. Still, when you consider the amount of money wasted on the Skylink, costly design competitions, and studies that found nothing but their own irrelevance, we could already have a pretty damn fine Penn's Landing.

Hopefully the DRWC can prove that they aren't just another organization in a long line of inept paper pushers, but rather the management that Penn's Landing has needed for the past four decades.



The Baltimore Avenue Camel

Omar Blaik of U3 Ventures brought his Baltimore Avenue project to the community with a novel concept: Ask the community what they want. 

Of course this idea is only novel in its ability to leapfrog a community that will inevitably beg the question, "well are you happier with nothing at all?"

The concept isn't new, and Blaik's use of it is likely more psychological than it is an attempt to truly field community opinion.  

It's still risky. 

We employ professionals for a reason: urban planners, architects, developers. When we hire amateurs to design we wind up with The Homer.

When a group of people who have nothing in common other than free time and something to complain about collaborate, we wind up with something known as a "camel," or a horse designed by a committee.

Parks & Recreation poked fun at urban planning with an example of the camel, when a group of city employees and "concerned citizens" all pitched in to design a mural. This is what happened.

Of course Blaik also risked never seeing his camel. Anyone who's ever been to a community meeting knows what kind of people would jump at Blaik's offer.

They're not fun people. 

They also don't work quickly. People who have time to go to community meetings have time.

In Inga Saffron's article on the subject, she cites the program established a decade ago by PennPraxis to develop a cohesive plan for the Central Delaware Waterfront as a nod to this type of community involvement, but fails to emphasize that it was developed a decade ago. 

Where are we with that?  

The Central Delaware Waterfront isn't a cohesive collection of neighborhood input and rainbow farts. In fact, it's just as bad as it's always been. Hell, the communal organization that rallied around PennPraxis can't even decide on a master plan. Instead they hold a yearly "show us your cool rendering, everyone" contest, piss away a few hundred grand, and maybe hang a new banner on the west end of their aerial tram to nowhere.

The only changes that have taken place on the Central Delaware Waterfront in the last decade are where developers have managed to defy the Motley Crue of amateur urban planners that run it.

SugarHouse and Waterfront Square sit fortressed from the city behind gates and parking lots while the amateur planners someone decided to put in charge continue to shoot down respectably integrated midrises that don't jive with the organization's nonexistent master plan. 

That's what happens when you put concerned citizens in charge. That's why we have professionals. The Central Delaware Waterfront will be lucky if it ever sees its camel.

Fortunately for Blaik, his experiment in community involvement will just land him with some boring townhouses. He's a developer and primarily concerned with making money, so he's not going to sit around and push paper like a city planner.

U3's Horse

What's disconcerting is the notion that this concept should be the future of urban planning. How can you expect more than the lowest common denominator when you ask a group of nurses, students, teachers, auto mechanics, military retirees, and housewives to design and plan a building? 

Of all people, our more artistic critics should see the potentially bland skyline of a city designed by a collection of its residents, instead of those schooled in design.

Could you see something designed by Frank Furness or Erdy-McHenry offered up on the chopping block of a town hall discussion?

Obviously community involvement is important, and our neighborhood coalitions do a fine job routinely reminding us just how involved they are in dictating creative control of our cityscape. 

That leaves our creative critics to address the need for exciting design that might not always appeal to absolutely everyone, advocating on the part of architects and artists with, "love it or hate it, you'll learn to live with it."